Fiona Hill

And generally, they just thought that we were using Ukraine as some kind of proxy or some kind of instrument within our own domestic politics, as that's what it looked like.

And I think that as a result of that,

Putin took the idea away that he could do whatever he wanted.

We were constantly being asked, even prior to this, by people around

Putin, like Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the National Security Council equivalent in Russia, who we met with frequently.

What's Ukraine to you?

We don't get it.

Why do you even care?

So they thought that we weren't serious, that we weren't serious about Ukraine's territorial integrity and its independence, or it is a national security player.

And Putin also thought that he could just manipulate the political space in the United States.

Actually, he could, because what he was doing was seeding all this dissent and fueling, you know, already in a debate inside of U.S.

politics, the kinds of things that we see just kind of coming out now.

This kind of idea that Ukraine was a burden, that Ukraine was basically just trying to extract things

from the United States.

The Ukraine had somehow played inside of US politics.

Trump was convinced that the Ukrainians had done something against him, that they had intervened in the elections.

And that was kind of, you know, a combination of people around him trying to find an excuse as to, you know, kind of what had happened in the election to kind of divert attention away from Russia's interference in 2016 and the Russians themselves poisoning the well against Ukraine.

So you had a kind of a confluence of circumstances there.

And what I was trying to get across in that testimony was the national security imperative of basically getting our act together here and separating out what was going on in our domestic politics from what was happening in our national security and foreign policy.

I mean, I think we contributed in that whole mess around the impeachment, but just the whole parallel policies around Ukraine to the war that we now have.